Victimization

7 Pages 1828 Words

u care for your parent," said Santa Ana attorney Richard Schwartzberg, who represented the defendant in the case before the court. "But you don't have to take on that responsibility." The court, in a 4-3 decision, examined the 1990 death of a Huntington Beach widower who, according to a prosecutor, lay alone without food or water and covered in his feces while his grown children ate Thanksgiving dinner in another room. The father, 67, a stroke victim who died days later of septic poisoning, was mentally fit but partially paralyzed, malnourished and dehydrated. His body was covered with gruesome bedsores and his own excrement. A son told police that he was too busy cooking the holiday dinner to answer his father's call for help to the bathroom and later shut the bedroom door so the odor would not permeate the house, according to Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Molko. The son also admitted that!
he had withheld food and liquids from his father for three days preceding his death because company was expected and the son did not want the house to smell. Molko won convictions against two sons who lived with their father but also wanted to charge an adult daughter who had been in the home on the holiday and on several occasions before his death. The victim's wife had died three years earlier. The court majority, interpreting what it called an overly...